On today's show, The Indicator's Cardiff Garcia talks with Martha Gimbel, Executive Director of The Hiring Lab at Indeed, where she oversees a team of economists whose very mission is to analyze labor market data.

Over the last couple of days, you sent in truckloads of queries about the job market. Cardiff selected a handful and then Martha answered them, adding her own take on America's employment situation.

For weary travelers, hotel blackout curtains can be crucial for rest and relaxation.

"It's a product you're familiar with it, but you never think much about," said Mark Berman, the CEO of Rockland Industries, a Baltimore-based textile company that's been manufacturing the fabrics since the 1960s.

British Airways says it is "investigating, as a matter of urgency, the theft of customer data from our website and our mobile app," after it found a breach that exposed financial information over a two-week period.

The U.S. economy added 201,000 jobs in August, the Labor Department said on Friday, continuing its nearly eight-year streak of monthly gains. The unemployment rate remained unchanged at a very low 3.9 percent.

When the Trump administration decided to pay subsidies to farmers hurt by trade, it reminded NPR's Planet Money podcast team about the time another president tried to help farmers. Kenny Malone has the epic tale of government cheese.

Advances in technology have driven eye-popping advances in productivity over the last hundred years. As machines have replaced artisans, individual humans have gone from making a single item every so often to producing hundreds of lamps or chocolate bars or T-shirts every hour.

I can feel the warmth from the wood-burning oven just over my shoulder and catch myself intermittently gazing off into a heat-induced trance from the blaze.

Despite the place feeling crowded (probably another reason for the heat), it's eerily quiet inside: My table of five occasionally lowers our voices as if we were in the library. But a library this is not: Mozzeria is one of the most talked-about pizzerias in the heart of a vibrant San Francisco neighborhood, where wait times on Saturday nights can extend as long as two hours.

Tomorrow, Starbucks will open its first store in Italy, the country that considers itself coffee's spiritual home. NPR's Sylvia Poggioli knows coffee, and she knows Italy. And she says the company has set itself up for a challenge.

To be clear, economists have not been discussing an epidemic the past few weeks — at least, not the kind that directly concerns physical health. They're talking about the economic health of emerging markets around the world. And the diagnosis doesn't look great.

Cardiff just got back from vacation, and a lot's been happening with the North American Free Trade Agreement while he's been away. There was an agreement between Mexico and the U.S. Canada was in talks at one point, then out, then back in again. Officials flew back and forth. There were lots of headlines. And a deadline. Which was blown.

Phew!

A lot has happened, and we're all pretty confused about what's been going on. So Cardiff thought he'd call Soumaya Keynes of the Economist for a catch-up.

The billionaire head of one of China's top e-commerce sites who was arrested over the weekend in Minnesota is under investigation following an accusation of felony rape in the Midwestern state, according to a Minneapolis Police report.

No charges have been filed against Liu Qiangdong, also known as Richard Liu, who is the founder of the Beijing-based online shopping platform JD.com, a rival to Alibaba.com. The Minneapolis police report did not provide details of the alleged incident leading to Friday's arrest.

China has been at the center of a months-long debate about tariffs this year. The U.S. has erected trade barriers in two phases so far. Fifty billion dollars of Chinese goods are currently affected. The U.S. trade representative is talking about tariffs on a further $200 billion of imports, which could apply as soon as this week.

The tech and retail behemoth, founded as an online bookstore by CEO Jeff Bezos in 1994, has been consistently profitable only since 2015. In fact, Amazon profits have averaged $2 billion in each of the first two quarters of this year.

The New Yorker has disinvited Steve Bannon from the magazine's upcoming annual festival, after several high-profile celebrities balked at the idea of appearing alongside the man credited with many of the divisive strategies that propelled Donald Trump's presidential campaign.

Explaining the decision, New Yorker editor David Remnick said that "to interview Bannon is not to endorse him." But less than 12 hours after announcing Bannon as a headliner for the Oct. 5-7 festival, Remnick canceled his plan to interview Bannon.

The combined newsrooms of the Virginia papers for the controversy-scarred Tronc newspaper company are following the path to unionization taken by counterparts at much larger Tronc papers in Los Angeles and Chicago, NPR has learned.